A Matter of Time and Place
by scriviner
Summary: Booster Gold early JLI era. He's saving the future, but what exactly does he have to do to get it done?


**A Matter of Time and Place.**  
a short weird fic by Scriviner

usual disclaimer: no profit, just fun

Booster kept glancing at his watch. Granted, he was out of costume, and it was unlikely anyone would recognize him, but the place still made him horribly, horribly uncomfortable.

Still, sometimes one had to do distasteful things to ensure the future.

That was one of the little secrets he had from the rest of the cape and spandex set. Everyone knew he was from the future. He practically had it out on print ads for a while. What always struck him as funny was that no one ever really thought about what that meant. They saw the whole big thing of his having future technology, but no one noticed that he also had the little things.

Like a few stock market pages from this era. Or a dog-eared sports almanac that had every football and baseball score for the next twenty years tucked away with him. Not that they really did him any good. For some reason after the first big temporal crisis, those were pretty much useless.

But there were other bits of knowledge that he had in his possession, which, while he wasn't sure if they were going to happen or not, he certainly couldn't take any risks. Family history was an important thing, his grandmother used to tell him.

Hence his current predicament.

This place, this day and this time were the driving factors behind his joining Justice League International. He had the broad strokes worked out, but he'd been improvising until just this moment... a moment which had to occur in the next ten minutes or things could go really badly for him.

He knocked impatiently on the door and called out, "Hey, are you going to take all night in there?"

The door opened just a crack to reveal half of a flustered, somewhat frustrated and exceedingly drunk face. "Look, I'm dooooin' my besht here. I' wash your idear, buh I notish you ain't in 'ere!"

Between the brewery scent of the man's breath and the antiseptic smell of the room, Booster had no choice but to retreat. He held his hands up in a gesture of surrender, "They were asking for a birth certificate. I couldn't tell them mine isn't even going to be printed up for another five hundred years. Besides, you've got a full head of hair, an engineering degree, you've been the CEO of a major corporation and you're in great shape. How could they turn you down?"

The only reply he got was a rather unfocused glare.

"Come on, the sooner you get done, the sooner we can get some more Tequila shooters, ok?"

"Fine," grumbled the other and slammed the door shut in Booster's face.

Unable to resist one last jab, Booster called out, "I could ask the nurse to come in there and help, you know?"

"Shaddup! I'm workin' on it!" his friend bellowed back through the door.

Booster glanced down at his watch a few minutes later as a howl of triumph erupted from behind the door. The blonde man smirked. Take that temporal paradox!

It had taken some doing. Getting his friend drunk enough was easy. Steering the conversation to their second-favorite favorite topic, money, had likewise been easy. Getting him to agree to this little donation as being the fastest way to raise some seed cash for a new get-rich-quick scheme was the real challenge. Fortunately, by the time the subject of this deposit had come up, Beetle was already blitzed out of his skull on a half dozen margaritas.

The door was flung open as Ted strode out in his rumpled clothes, with a huge grin on his face. Held aloft in one hand was a covered cup that was sufficiently opaque that Booster didn't have to see its contents, but was translucent enough to let him know that it was definitely half-filled.

"Hahah!" he crowed, "Tolja I goddit' covered!"

Booster nodded enthusiastically. The timing was perfect. That little cup was going to be transferred into a several vials. Half of which, he knew were going to be mislabeled in the next few hours. The mislabeled vials by a comedy of errors and coincidence would eventually end up being stored in a refrigerated bunker in downtown Metropolis where 450 years later, they would be found, and in a fit of whimsy by his grandmother, used for their express purpose in the mistaken belief that they were originally Superman's. It wasn't until after his father was born, who was quite distinctly un-Supermanlike, that his grandmother in a fit of towering rage and disappointment managed to backtrack that sample to this place, and this time.

Now that he had ensured his own future, he just had to get his grandfather out of there without embarrassing themselves any further. "Didn't doubt it for a second, Beetle, ole-buddy. Just get that over to the nurse and we're back at the bar in no time flat."


End file.
